From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also hear this show on KCRW.com.

Who would have thought there was a great

documentary to be made on teen magicians? If you were director Jay Clay Tweedle, you did and you were

right. The film is make-believe. The documentary that played the LA Film Festival. It's also available now

on the movie channel and the DVD will be released on September 20th. He's with me now in Los Angeles. Clay, thanks for doing this.

Thank you so much for having me. Tell me what it was that made you think there was a doc to be

made about this particular world. The origin story is Stephen Klein, the producer, was a teenage

magician himself. So he always wanted to make a dock in the world of magic, but didn't know what it was.

And then he was in New York at this magic shop called Tannins, and he saw these three, like, kind of very awkward, shy, teenage boys, and they could barely look at anything but their shoes.

And all of a sudden, they picked up a deck of cards

and got behind the counter there and started performing. And we're just like these consummate showmen.

So he saw that and was like, God, maybe that's the way into the world of magic to tell a good story.

And so he came back and told Seth Gordon and Ed Cunningham, the executive producers,

and we all kind of then got together and started thinking about like what's a way to facilitate

the best story in that world. And we just kind of dove in and started finding these amazing

characters. Thinking about it early on was, all right, this needs to be a coming of age story.

And so how can we best capture these kids learning some sort of life lesson?

And it's also a little bit of a ticking clock because there's some of the kids

it's their last chance before they're no longer teenagers to compete in this way.

Yeah, Bill Cook, who's one of the characters, he, you know,

he had been there five years in a row. And when we heard him and interviewed him for the first time,

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